Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  As she hugged her mother, Stephen carried her rucksack into the hallway and her father commented on the rain holding off. Then he looked down and said, “Now what in God’s name is that?”

  The dog was jumping up at her knees. She stooped and picked her up.

  “Atlantic. You remember me telling you about the dog?”

  “I do, yes. I didn’t know you were bringing it over.”

  “Her.”

  Atlantic gave Liz’s ear an explorative lick and Kenneth grimaced.

  “I found her on a subway platform.”

  Judith said to Stephen, “Will you sit and have a cup of tea? Or coffee? We have a new machine.”

  “I really should fly on, actually. I have to be in Tandragree by twelve.” Stephen felt the little extra silence Judith greeted this with, and said, “Maybe a quick coffee.”

  “It’s very good of you to go and pick this one up,” Judith continued, to Stephen, who did not disguise in his face the fact that he thought it was good of him too.

  “Well, Alison’s off to a fitting there for the dress, isn’t she, and I know you guys have enough to be getting on with.”

  “I think we’re almost there,” Judith said.

  Kenneth frowned. “I don’t see why your brother couldn’t have—”

  “I didn’t ask Spencer,” Liz cut him off. “I mean I texted him and left him a message, but sure he never got back to me.”

  Stephen looked from Liz to her father. Already a gloom of mutual resentment was setting in on both their faces.

  “The garden looks very well,” Stephen offered, but the thought of the garden only reminded Kenneth of the tent that was destined to destroy his lawn.

  “The marquee people were supposed to come tomorrow morning to put it up, but now they say they can’t come till the afternoon.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Judith said, throwing Liz a glance. “It’ll all be fine.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Liz lugged her rucksack up the stairs, and set it on the bed beside one of her old exercise books. She flicked through it and felt a great rush of sadness. There was such pathos in childish handwriting, especially one’s own. Time had this terrible habit of creeping up and pistol-whipping you on the back of the head. She unzipped her suitcase and decided she couldn’t be bothered to unpack yet. She emptied her pockets of her passport and coins and gum on the vanity unit, where her mother had set a little vase with a head of blue hydrangea from the garden. Behind the vase, propped against the mirror, was a neat row of eight copies of her own book—all signed by her—which Kenneth kept there in case he ever found anyone else to give it to. She lifted the books and set them in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe.

  After she received her PhD from King’s College, London, Liz had entered “her slump,” as the family referred to it: two years of trying to get her thesis on Lévi-Strauss accepted by academic publishers, and being rejected for dozens of research fellowships and junior teaching positions, and working in a bar in Clapham, and smoking a great deal of weed. One lunchtime, having woken at noon, she stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and noticed the letter on the table, a smear of raspberry jam on its corner. Aberystwyth University Press was keen to meet and talk about the thesis, meaning they were interested in bringing it out, and the very next day, a Friday, she traveled at ludicrous expense on two trains and a rail-replacement bus service to see their publisher, Owen Hughes, who was, it turned out, a Lévi-Strauss expert himself. He disagreed about aspects of Liz’s characterization of Lévi-Strauss’s relationship to art, had met Claude, more than once, and had come away with many subtly self-flattering anecdotes from these encounters. Liz perched in a low leather club seat and felt herself sliding lower and lower and lower, until it seemed she looked up at the desk from several feet beneath it. The interview concluded with Liz being asked whether she’d be capable of writing a short guide to either quantum physics or dogs, which was the kind of thing that sold at the moment, and her replying no, not really, no.

  For the next month Liz got up and sat in her pajamas and watched daytime television, smoked more weed, and read only magazines, and on a drizzling Wednesday morning woke up knowing instinctively what she had to do. She caught the 34 bus to the Victorian library on Brixton Hill, walked between the rows of computers where recent immigrants typed up their CVs, and found the self-help section. She photocopied the chapter pages and indices of every book that didn’t look obviously stupid or crazy. She found an empty carrel, set up her laptop, and started a spreadsheet in which she collated the main recurring topics, and typed in what Lévi-Strauss had to say about them. And that was the genesis of The Use of Myth: How Lévi-Strauss Can Help Us All Live a Little Better. Whenever she couldn’t find anything relevant in the actual work, she just extrapolated from the circumstances of his life, and soon she had a seventy-thousand-word manuscript that told the story of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work and pontificated cleverly, or cleverly enough, on the usual topics of love, marriage, infidelity, work, ambition, children, parents . . .

  It found a small but respectable publisher, Hawksmoor, within a few weeks. The advance was a modest two thousand pounds, but after a series of interviews, the book began to sell quite well. When it was taken as a Radio 4 Book of the Week, sales accelerated and they went to a fifth reprint. A week after that, the publisher forwarded an e-mail from a producer called Henry Barfoot who was interested in possibly making it a program for BBC Four. Was Liz interested in presenting?

  Having taken a few months to write and rewrite, and a few weeks to shoot, and one tortuous day to add voice-over to, when it was finally broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening the Times heralded the hour-long show, The Use of Myth, as “fairly informative,” the Guardian trumpeted it as “standard BBC Four fare,” and the Telegraph lauded Liz’s presenting as “adequate, if a little stiff.” Judith had half of Ballyglass watching and was in tears on the message she left on Liz’s answerphone, telling her how proud she was. She’d even coaxed Kenneth into leaving a bluff “Well done.”

  She had been writing the follow-up—attempting to do the same with Margaret Mead—for the last seven years. The book seemed to expand in every direction as she got more and more and also less and less interested in her, reading volume after volume of published work, then diaries and letters, and taking notes and underlining and stockpiling the timeline with anecdote and incident. The work had grown monstrous. She’d stopped actually putting words on the virtual page when the word count had hit 321,123, though her reasons for halting there were random and inscrutable to herself and seemed to be based solely on the palindromic, magical nature of the figure. That had happened several months ago, as she sat marking essays in the Moonlight Diner on Tenth Avenue. Now just seeing the file on her desktop gave her a singular feeling of dull terror. She was currently managing to look at the manuscript for a few minutes every couple of days before getting bored, or panicking, or getting bored of panicking. She’d follow the thread of her inattention through a maze of hyperlinks, and two hours later would know slightly more about, say, Hawking or fracking or twerking.

  Alison’s voice came up from below. She was describing something as just completely pointless to her parents. Liz went down and met her younger sister at the bottom of the stairs, where they hugged and then pulled back and thought to themselves how old the other one appeared.

  “You look great!” Liz said.

  “I do not,” Alison countered with a wince. “I’ve been dieting for the wedding, but sure I’ve only lost seven pounds—”

  “That’s not bad.”

  “That short haircut really suits you—” Alison said.

  “Och, it’s an old woman’s cut.”

  “And you’ve lost weight.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  “Don’t sicken me.”

  “How was your dress fitting? All ready to go?”


  “Sandra’d put the zip on upside down. Can you believe it? It’s sorted now. I’m not paying her to fix it.”

  Liz followed her into the kitchen.

  “Is this new?”

  Liz ran her finger along the top of the dining table. Alison nodded and whispered to her, “It wouldn’t be to my taste, but I can see why it’s nice.”

  Kenneth’s voice arose from the armchair. “No one’s asking you to sit at it.”

  Alison made a face at her sister. “Nothing’s changed.” She raised her voice: “I’m just saying it’s very dark, for my taste. For a kitchen.”

  “Is it mahogany?” Liz asked.

  “Yes, and extendable,” Kenneth’s voice announced.

  Home was where you could spend an hour discussing any fixture or fitting or real estate question. Judith tended to praise, Alison to criticize, Kenneth to lament—the mysteries of planning permission or building regulations, the fad for Artex, the difficulty of removing stone cladding. Bay windows, rockeries, conservatories, the exotica of PVC apexes and dado rails and pelmets and the correct way to edge a lawn or instruct a repossession. They talked about crawlspaces and conversions. A rumor of subsidence or dry rot came among them with the same frisson that another family might have felt upon encountering reports of embezzlement or incest. Any house or flat or shop that entered the Mid-Ulster market fell squarely in their purview and their remit. They knew who’d built it, who’d lived in it, why it was to be sold, what they were asking, what they were hoping, what they would accept.

  They talked like this because they talked in code of what they loved—not this particular extendable dining room table in mahogany but Ballyglass, continuity, sitting in judgment on one’s neighbors, and being granted membership of a family by way of all hating the same thing.

  “How are the kids?”

  “Mickey’s in the car. Come out with me now and we’ll wake him. Stephen said you slept the whole way.”

  “I didn’t mean to . . . I was just—I hadn’t slept all night.”

  “But did you like him?”

  “I really did. We had a good chat, I mean, when I wasn’t dozing.”

  “He doesn’t drink, you know, not really.”

  Liz smiled sadly at this preemptive defense. The next thing she said as kindly as possible, though it didn’t stop the collapse of her sister’s face.

  “Have you heard from Bill?”

  “Nothing. I send photos to his mother but sure she hardly replies. I have to pinch myself to remember: These are his children! Imagine doing that.”

  Atlantic padded dolefully into the kitchen doorway and stood there like she brought bad news from the front. Liz felt grateful; it saved them both from the painful act of conceiving Bill’s interior life.

  —

  She’d met her first husband, Bill, when the office was broken into and her parents were in Connemara for the weekend. Sergeant Bill Williams. It was a Protestant joke, that name: William, son of William, inheritor of sash and stick and puritanical despair. He was not handsome, but he had a nice clean freckled face and innocent blue eyes. Nor was he funny exactly, but he tried hard to be funny, and she liked that. She was twenty-six years old and absolutely ready to fall hopelessly in love. When he took her to Paris for the weekend, they stayed in a little hotel called Select near the Sorbonne, the bellboy departed, untipped, and they’d fallen on each other with an animal hunger surprising to her. But it seemed to have used up all the desire in one go. That night they’d gone out and Bill drank two bottles of the restaurant’s house white, almost by himself, and fell asleep immediately, not touching her. And that was her first clue. Didn’t stop her marrying him, but also meant she wasn’t entirely surprised by what followed. He was never physically abusive, but when he drank he said the most awful things, and it took it out of you, being told you were a whore, a fat slut, a moron, a useless fucking bitch. She started to apologize all the time, for nothing, and to everyone. If she dared mention his drinking he had a list of responses ready, usually referring to his “stress.” And did he tell her to stop stuffing chocolate down her throat? She met her future in his mother, Edna, who ran the grocery shop in Comber while Norman, Bill’s father, drank the takings. Edna had learned to refuse the world’s overtures, its silly promises, had the hardened air of the continually disappointed.

  Soon enough it was a nightly thing. Collapsed by ten p.m. in the armchair. Even so, initially she managed to hide his drinking from her family pretty well. Then the first Christmas came, and with it the family lunch at Judith and Ken’s. They’d all sat down when Alison remembered the gravy. As she hoisted herself up to get it—she was six months pregnant with Isabel—and edged past Bill, he stuck a Christmas cracker out at her.

  “I’ll do that when I’m back.”

  “Just pull it,” Bill sighed.

  She could see the danger of the moment, and part of her wanted it all to go wrong. She wanted him exposed to her family. She wanted them to know the truth of it. He continued to push the cracker at the curve of her stomach and she ignored it.

  “Ah, just pull it now, pull the cracker, you fat cunt,” Bill muttered, and grabbed her arm.

  Across the linen tablecloth and pale candles and silver reindeer napkin rings, Judith lowered her head into her hands. Spencer jumped up. All of him shivering with tension under his shirt. Part of Alison detached from the scene; that part was very interested in how all this would play out.

  Bill worked out a laugh as Kenneth slowly got to his feet and said, “Perhaps you should go upstairs, to Ali’s old room, and take a nap.”

  The note in her father’s voice meant business. Spencer’s eyes shone with a defeated fury. Bill stared drunkenly ahead of him into the bowl of homemade cranberry sauce and then lazily turned to Kenneth, grinned wolfishly, and asked, “Why don’t you go and have a lie down, oul fella, before I put ye on yer fucking back?”

  Spencer was on him. Two chairs were knocked over. Although Bill had a few inches’ advantage, Spencer got him in a full nelson headlock and dragged him out onto the porch. It ended with Spencer banging Bill’s head against the doorframe.

  Bill joined the AA group that met in the community center off the Dungarvan Road. She did what she could. She poured bottles down the sink. She told him she loved him and wanted to help him. He avoided the old crowd from the station and didn’t go to the pub after work. They began attending her parents’ Presbyterian church out at Killyclogher. She could feel him trying, really trying, the constant effort coming off him like a buzzing. He was stretched and tense as a balloon, always on the cusp of losing it. It was necessary to devise stratagems. Each night she made dessert, she ran him a bath, she checked the listings to try to ensure there was some sport or a documentary or an action flick for him to watch. She bought a thousand-piece jigsaw of The Last Supper in Toymaster and started it on the dining room table, called it their project. They spent a single evening with their heads engrossed in it, so close they were almost touching, and she thought, as she sometimes thought, that this could work. The next night he wouldn’t look at it. Called it boring and stupid, and asked what the fuck was the point of a jigsaw. You put it together and then you pulled it apart. Like a marriage, she thought. She spent two weeks sitting at the table for an hour or two here and there, and hadn’t even half of it filled in. There was the entire sky still to do. She looked in the blank, unhelpful face of Jesus (out of the whole picture, he was the only one looking at the viewer) and swept the whole lot into a bin bag.

  It amazed her now how long it took her. It was a Friday night and she was washing up after dinner, watching the sun sinking between the town’s twin spires—Catholic and Protestant—and she thought, This isn’t going to get any better. She’d taken a pregnancy test at school that afternoon—according to her diary her period was three weeks late—and the little cross of St. Andrew surfaced in the stick’s window, a blue crucifixion
. Felt nothing. Not happy, not sad. Nothing. She taught the rest of the day in a daze of nothingness, smiling at the children, but absent inside. Now she looked at her own daughter—soft-limbed, big-eyed, spellbound in her high chair in front of the telly, but no longer a baby, surely only a few months away from the consciousness of what it meant when your daddy passed out in an armchair. She peeled off the rubber gloves, lifted the child to halfhearted protestations, went upstairs, started packing.

  Four months after she moved back home, Kenneth had another, minor, stroke, and Alison took early maternity leave and entered—little by little, toe by toe—the family business. Showing a home here, making a phone call there. Spencer had been working in Donnelly’s Estate Agents for years, but if he objected to her coming in, he never said anything directly, and Alison discovered she was good at it, at selling homes. She’d grown up with the lexicon of estate agency as her first language. Convenience. Location. Good bones. Character piece. Low maintenance. High yield. In recent years the property TV shows had added to her stock of ready-made phrases—wow factor, curb appeal, forever home, ticking the boxes—but it always felt a little ridiculous using them. She did, though. Her direct, judgmental manner worked on people; they wanted to agree with her, and if Alison made sure prospective buyers noted certain things, they were less likely to focus on certain other things, like the smell of the downstairs bathroom or the rising damp in the garage. She swept into a room and took control, opened blinds and cupboards, pointed out the overwhelming economic benefits of an electric shower or a multi-fuel stove or the lagging on a boiler. One wet cold morning in September—as she told the recently widowed Lily Burns to think of herself sitting out here on the patio, in the suntrap made by the fence and the back wall of the kitchen, reading a book and having a glass of wine or a cup of tea—it occurred to her that if she had a gift for presenting things not as they are, but as they really should be, well, that was only to be expected of someone who’d lived with an alcoholic for as long as she had.